Thank you. My sincere thanks to the
Swedish Academy. And thank you all for this very warm welcome.

Fiction has never been entertainment
for me. It has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe
that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information
is via narrative. So I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin
with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all
remember -- the phrase "Once upon a time...."

"Once upon a time there was an old
woman, blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot
soothing restless children. I've heard this story, or one exactly like it, in
the lore of several cultures.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman, blind...wise...."

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and
lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is
without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its
transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach
beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence
of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem bent on
disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she
is. Their plan is simple: They enter her house and ask the one question the
answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they
regard as a profound disability -- her blindness. They stand before her, and one
of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living
or dead."

She doesn't answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding
living or dead?" She still doesn't answer. She's blind. She can't see her visitors, let alone
what is in their hands. She doesn't know their color, their gender, or their homeland. She
only knows their motive.

The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their
laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I
don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know
is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."
Her answer can be taken to mean: If it's dead, you have either found it that
way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is
to stay alive, it's your decision. Whatever the case, it's your
responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are
reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also
for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman
shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which
that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might
signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now -- thinking, as
I have been -- about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I
choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She’s
worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled,
put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a
writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over
which one has control, but mostly as agency -- as an act with consequences.

So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal
because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly
imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if
the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for
the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written,
it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist
language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no
desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic
narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not
without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience,
suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or
tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling
silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve
privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the
knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental --
exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning
false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, and
absence of esteem, indifference, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but
all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children
have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of
speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have
abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance,
or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of
children. It’s common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants
whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their
human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force
obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its
users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and
subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is
violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media;
whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity
driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of
law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities,
hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek -- it must be rejected, altered,
and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks
its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves
relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language,
racist language, theistic language -- all are typical of the policing languages
of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual
exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable
dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would
be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep
citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls,
courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring,
memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will
be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There
is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to
pack their throats like pâté-producing geese with their own unsayable,
transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance
disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the
suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and
bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language
crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however
stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not
beating at all -- if the bird is already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any
discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time
and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required --
lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the
excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a
misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that
precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would
have expedited the building and heaven would’ve been reached. Whose heaven, she
wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a
little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other
views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been
found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life;
not heaven as post-life.

She wouldn't want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language
should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in
its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers,
readers, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience,
it’s not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country
had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say
here; but it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are
exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties, because they refused to
encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing
to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word," the precise "summing up,"
acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference
to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves
her, the recognition that -- that recognition that language can never live up to
life once and for all -- nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery,
genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its
force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it
laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen
silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But
who doesn’t know of literature banned, because it is interrogative; discredited
because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by
the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it’s generative; it makes meaning that
secures our difference, our human difference -- the way in which we are like no
other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the
measure of our lives.

"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old
woman a question. Who are they, these children? And what did they make of that
encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"?
A sentence that gestures toward possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps
what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I'm old, female, black,
blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of
language is yours."

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only
a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been
before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of
discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at
stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?"
Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?"
No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the
attention of a wise one, an old one. And if the old and the wise who have lived
life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she doesn’t.
She keeps her secret, her good opinion of herself, her gnomic
pronouncements, her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, reenforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated,
privileged space.
Nothing, no word follows her declarations of transfer. That silence is deep,
deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this
silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us
break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just
given us that is no education at all, because we are paying close attention to
what you have done as well as to what you have said, to the barrier you have
erected between generosity and wisdom.

"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only
you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you
couldn’t bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when
language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean?
When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and
demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

"Do we have to begin our consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like
you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except
what you imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness
embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its
self-congratulation, a made-for-television script that makes no sense if there
is nothing in our hands.

"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the soundbite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our
modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your
attention? We are young, unripe. We’ve heard all our short lives that we have to
be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has
become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it’s already
barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank
eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to
perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you
talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

"You trivialize us and you trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is
there no context for our lives, no song, no literature, no poem full of
vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us
start strong? You are an adult; the old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about
saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make
up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being
created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so
ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald.
Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the
places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly -- once and
for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and
yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in
the dark places and the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show
us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman,
blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language
can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness
of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell us what it is to be a woman, so that we may know what it is to be a man;
what moves at the margin; what it is to have no home in this place; to be set
adrift from the one you knew; what it is to live at the edge of towns that
cannot bear your company."

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field.
Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was
indistinguishable from the falling snow; how they knew from the hunch of the
nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last; how, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then suns;
lifting their faces as
though it was there for the taking, turning as though there for the taking. They
stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp, leaving them humming
in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves, and its
hiss and melt is the envy of the freezing slaves."

"The inn door opens.
A girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into
the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp
and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers
bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she
serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look
back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."

It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into
the silence.

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in
your hands, because you have truly caught it. How lovely it is, this thing we
have done -- together."